For those of us who were not around when President George Washington made his first visit to Guilford Courthouse 231 years ago, Charles Rodenbough, a GBC Board member, historian, and author provides us with the background and setting for his visit.
President George Washington came to North Carolina in mid-April 1791 mid-way through his tour of the Southern states. The year before he had made a similar tour through the North. His two trips were calculated to take on the structure of a “royal progress” that might have been made by a British monarch in an earlier generation designed to display a King in the flesh. The concept of a President or a Constitution was new to everyone in the United States and Washington sought to portray himself as a personification. His very image set the tone for what a President should and would be, not in uniform or regal robes, but a citizen of character in common concern with the people. He had come South by way of a coastal route and now he was returning from Georgia through the Western portions of the states. He came to Martinville (Guilford Courthouse) specifically to look over the battlefield at Guilford Courthouse. Washington and General Nathanael Greene had a running disagreement on battle tactics. Greene, taking his lead from the success of General Daniel Morgan at Cowpens, had deployed his local Militia troops at Guilford in two lines in front of his Regulars. Washington in similar situations had preferred to place his regulars in a frontal battle line and use his militiamen to fill gaps or points of weakness. Beyond this desire to compare the strategy of his trusted General, Washington had a distinct ulterior motive in coming to Guilford County. He sought to take the pulse of the masses of subsistence farmers who had poured into the mountains and southern Piedmont and were almost uniformly suspicious of distant governments of any kind. Governor Alexander Martin could be for Washington his authority on the attitude of the Governor’s own constituency. The new money policies of Alexander Hamilton had become manifest in their world in the form of speculators in land and Continental securities who were swindling them of what they had earned for their service in the Revolution. Perhaps even more important were taxes which had been levied against the one thing they could convert in quantity in order to produce cash – whiskey. Washington had a right to be concerned because he was soon to face a Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania and a similar public protest in Massachusetts in Shay’s Rebellion. From Guilford, Washington moved on to Speedwell Iron Works in Rockingham County for breakfast and then back to Mount Vernon.
